The exultation of referendums is one of the indicators that we’ve lost confidence, not only in politicians but also in the democratic capabilities of our political system. It’s an acknowledgment that, in this epoch of elites and corporate power, these…

In 1990 the techno-prophet Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would even be able to outplay a chess master by 1998. He was wrong, of course. It was in 1997 that Deep Blue defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov. The world’s fastest computer at that time was the ASCI Red, developed by the American military and offering a peak performance speed of one teraflop. It was the size of a tennis court and cost $55 million. Fifteen years later, in 2013, a new supercomputer came on the market…

Rita Foroohar is assistant managing editor at TIME and the magazine’s economics columnist. This article appears in the May 23, 2016 issue of TIME. It's well worth reading in full

A couple of weeks ago, a poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics found something startling: only 19% of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified themselves as “capitalists.” In the richest and most market-oriented country in the world, only 42% of that group…